Alisha Glass Blog: Overseas a Blessing in the End

NOTE: Alisha Glass is writing a blog for Mizuno, a key USA Volleyball sponsor and partner. Glass is a Mizuno-sponsored athlete and will periodically provide insights into being a U.S. Women's National Team athlete while representing Mizuno. For more information Mizuno, visit mizunousa.com.

Hello all!!

Playing volleyball overseas is definitely a blessing. You get to play the sport you love and travel to new places. However, sometimes, that travel is a little more of a burden than a blessing. For example, yesterday we left Sopot, Poland, at 4:30 am, drove to the Gdansk airport for a 6:30 flight. We flew the one hour it takes to get to Warsaw, which is a pretty big airport. We then had to walk around and find a transfer desk in order to get our next two tickets for the rest of our trip. We found one lady helping us, we have just about 18 people, so needless to say that took a little while. We had time though, we had a three hour layover there.

Then we flew to the Moscow airport. We had to stand in line for a transfer security check for about 30 minutes. Time wasn't an issue here either because we had a nice five hour layover here. We then left on our last flight to Azerbaijan. We got in at 12:30 am, only 17 hours later with the time change.

While trips like this can take its toll on the body, it will all be worth it in the long run. Now that we're in Azerbaijan, we get to play against Nellie Spicer and Kim Glass, and also in this city are Heather Bown, Jennifer Tamas and Tayyiba Haneef-Park. It will be so great to see so many Americans in a foreign city. It will make those 17 hours seem like a breeze.

Our match against Kim and Nellie is the second of this round for the quarterfinals in Champions League. We won the last match and a win against them would put us in the final four which would be an amazing accomplishment. If we lose, we immediately play a golden set, to determine who advances. Either way, it should be a fun night! Hopefully afterwards we'll have time for dinner and a chance to catch up with them.

This will be a long road trip for us because after this match we head straight to play a team for Polish league, and after that we head straight to playoff game. We'll be gone a total of eight days. It's important to break up long trips into pieces in order to keep our focus on each match, one at a time. It would be great to get back to Sopot with three wins under our belts.